


long, steady road (oh, travel, be kind)

by thespiritscalling



Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Gen, Post-Season/Series 01, They Don't Find Dirk au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-05
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-02-28 14:34:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13273500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thespiritscalling/pseuds/thespiritscalling
Summary: in which Dirk never falls out of the trunk, and time goes on and on and on and on





	long, steady road (oh, travel, be kind)

**Author's Note:**

> title from "I Won't Let You Go (Darling)" by Hedley.  
> (alternative titles included "looking for burnt-out stars" and "some peace of mind")

It takes a long time to stop hurting. Farah is with him, having shoved away the crowd that gathered ( _what’s happening? should we call an ambulance? look at that weird guy!_ ) and he boosts himself up so his back is against the wall- the only stable thing he can trust.

“Amanda,” he says. Farah is holding his cell phone.

“She’s okay,” she says, and he sags impossibly further against the wall in relief. “Freaked to all hell, though. I tried to call her back but she’s not answering anymore.” Farah’s perpetual anxiety seems to have skyrocketed. “What about you?”

Todd knows. He’d rather not come to terms with it yet- _jesus, this is the worst time, and so horribly karmic_ \- so he says, “Dirk?”

Farah’s eyebrows scrunch and she bites her lip. He feels it coming, a deep pain in his stomach threatening to begin burning even after the attack has passed, so in a way he’s not at all surprised when she says, “Missing.”

That doesn’t make it hurt any less.

When he’s stopped shaking enough to stand up and leave the restaurant, she fills him in on everything. Her short conversation with Amanda, which consisted mostly of panicked yelling at the other and reassurances that yes, bad things are happening but currently I’m okay and Todd may have pararibulitis and well, shit. Amanda had to run, but she told Farah that she was going to try to call as soon as she could. Todd took that as a sign that she was fighting for safety, and fights Amanda started were not often lost.

Dirk, Farah says, was acting peculiar. Like he knew something to be off so he went to investigate and simply never returned.

“They could be in danger,” says Todd, resigned. “We should look for them.”

Farah gives him a look that plainly says we need to at least think about this but Todd knows she’s going to agree. Despite only being around them for five days, she is as attached to the three of them as they are each other. 

“We’ll look around,” she decides finally. Todd’s palms prickle threateningly. He shoves the sensation aside.

 

They wait at the restaurant until nightfall in hopes that Dirk just ran off for a short period of time. During this time they scour the area, checking under benches and behind buildings for any sign of- well, anything. With Dirk it’s really been a toss-up. 

Farah clings onto a smooth poster card for a long period of silence before calling Todd over. 

“Lux DuJour,” Todd muses, reading off the card. “The house we kind of burned down- Rimmer was really into him. They found his body under the garage.”

“This is new,” Farah says, turning it over in her hand. “Probably printed within the past few days. Knowing what kind of shit that’s been happening around here, this can’t be a coincidence.”

Dirk doesn’t show up to the restaurant and he doesn’t call and a knock on his apartment door proves he’s not at home either. The poster card serves as a reminder that he is nowhere to be found. 

 

They stock up on pararibulitis medication and start searching. Dirk’s apartment is spectacularly mundane aside from the radio, which has six dials and an antenna, all of which seem to do nothing. Todd pets the cat, who has found her own way back home, and his search amounts to absolutely nothing. Zero. Squat.

“Todd,” Farah calls from the bedroom, “in here.”

Todd drops the cat and follows her to the room, where Farah is holding a small shoebox-sized metal container in her hands.

“It’s full of fakes,” she says. “IDs, papers, everything someone would need to literally reinvent themselves. I found it under the loose floorboard by his bed.”

Todd rifles through the papers: Andrew Whitehead. Steve Janson. Names that mean nothing to him.

“He wouldn’t have-”

“No,” says Todd resolutely. “He wouldn’t. We were just about to start something. He was happy.”

Farah shrugs, doubt weighing down her shoulders, but she shuts the lid on the box and throws it onto the bed. It’s more of a mattress, really, with a couple pillows and a sheet stretched across. A lamp is plugged into the wall on the opposite side, next to the window. 

There’s a symbol carved into the top of the metal box. Todd picks it up again and studies it against the waning sunlight. The lines are thin and shallow, but he can make out a circle inside a diamond with a line running through it. 

“Farah,” he says. Farah, who has somehow silently retreated from the bedroom, enters again with a sense of urgency. “Do you recognize this?”

She examines it. “No.”

“Shit.”

Todd takes a picture of the symbol and then leaves the box where it was found. Other than that, the apartment gives them no clues. They are reluctant to leave.

 

Amanda’s place turns up equally empty, although Todd expected this. He suspects she’s with the Rowdies somewhere, somehow- she can easily take care of herself on a good day. Still, Todd calls her on regular intervals and listens to a falsely chipper voicemail detail exactly where he can stick his apologies, each time hoping that this will be the time she picks up.

There’s something gnawing at the bottom of his stomach and it feels like dread. It feels like something is causing the world to shift and twirl around its axes until nothing is in its place anymore.

If everything is out of place now, what does that mean for his life before?

 

Seattle as a whole brings them nothing new. Todd hopes that their active searching would bring them somewhere at least; one baby step closer to finding either Amanda or Dirk (but preferably both of them) would be enough. Everything feels suspiciously like it did before Dirk even climbed into Todd’s life- depressingly mundane, with absolutely no accelerated amounts of strange. Todd doesn’t even know what to look for.

Todd tends to replay his last few conversations with Amanda in his head. He watches as she turns away from him again and again and again, spitting words that he knows are nothing but the truth. The truth is cold and hard and hungry but there’s nothing he can do- if anything, the hallucinations he’s begun to receive on the daily are just the universe repaying him for his mistakes.

Then he thinks about Dirk, their argument and subsequent reconciliation ( _after he got shot twice with a crossbow,_ he reminds himself) and how much he had probably messed up the first good thing he’d had in _years_. 

Usually, after these instances of major recollections, Todd finds himself covered in a layer of frost or with worms eating their way out of his skin. This, he knows, will definitely take a while to adjust to.

 

And then Farah decides to hack into the FBI database. Which is a feat all in itself, and Todd is still not quite sure how she managed to make it work, but it doesn’t help that now they’re wanted by the federal government for some sort of treason and viewing private documents.

 _Excellent._

Which means that they probably have to ditch town. Todd makes sure the kitten-shark knows what’s going on, and he has no qualms about it going hungry. It can most definitely handle itself. He sells some of the less important things in his apartment and buys more meds as well as taking the rest of Amanda’s stash and leaves a note on his bedroom door: _call me if you’re who I’m looking for._

Farah buys them lunch and they take her car straight out of Seattle. 

 

There’s not much in the rest of the country either. It’s a large place, admittedly- and if Dirk doesn’t want to be found, there’s no doubt that he would go far, far away- but it hasn’t been long. Todd isn’t even sure of what they’re looking for, but he keeps his eyes open for anything with particularly high amounts of _odd_. Somehow, the world seems to have reverted to normalcy, and the previous week feels like a dream.

He voices his concerns to Farah one day. They’re sitting across from each other at a small independent joint, sharing a plate of nachos. She looks at him with soft eyes.

“I felt it too, Todd,” she says. “We’re not out of place. The world around us is.”

 

They drive and drive and drive and _drive._

 

Around the two month mark, he says, “We’re close. I can feel it.”

What he can actually feel is the window hitting his head as they drive over a particularly rough piece of road. The dull ache as the surface hits his head (rather, his head hits the surface, but his world seems to be the one moving without _him_ so there’s no reason to believe he’s not completely still) is the only sort of comfort he has in his surroundings.

“You need sleep,” she tells him. “You haven’t slept in a while.”

“I’ll sleep when he’s beside me,” he says petulantly. Like a kid. Like he had the chance to be a kid, just for a moment, wary of the world yet so excited to discover what it would hold. 

What the world holds is not exciting. The world holds cruel and unforgiving lives and people who are not afraid to claim those lives as their own. 

He can hardly believe he ever used to be a kid.

“I’m pulling over,” she declares. “You keep adjusting your seatbelt when you’re pretending to sleep, like it’s choking you. Just stretch out over the back, I’ll get us some food for the morning.”

“Far, it’s two am.”

“Exactly.” 

He doesn’t sleep. They’re so _close._ There’s a feeling somewhere inside him that’s so new but so hopeful, like the one person’ he’s looking for is going to be there when he wakes up in the morning. 

He wakes up in the back of the car so _painfully_ alone. He doesn’t even have the feeling to keep him company. 

 

He’s well aware that he’s been crazy for a while now. Every slight shift in temperature, every insect that crawls into the car, the way the wind shifts a certain piece of grass _just so_ is a sign. A sign that they’re getting somewhere when really all they’re getting is more and more disappointment and emptiness. No amount of grass and insects can fill this ever-growing hole inside of him, and he can’t help but get the feeling that there was something they missed. 

They keep looking.

 

The thing is, it’s not always anxiety and pain and that deep-seated feeling of hopelessness that usually crawls up when Todd is alone. He turns up the radio and lets the music drown his emotions better than he can himself. Farah stops the car on the side of the road and they eat lunch on the roof. He finds wildflowers outside of an overgrown motel and picks a few to keep in the car, reminding him of Amanda when she was younger and the bright colours of Dirk’s jackets.

They find an open-mic bar and manage to pawn a used guitar off of a sweet- albeit drunk- musician. Todd gets his fingers to remember what it felt like to skim across the frets and play with ease, and then he opens his mouth and sings until he can’t feel anything anymore. Farah’s there in the crowd getting slightly tipsy and whooping loudly whenever he finishes a song.

They spend the night taking turns pushing each other up against the back of the building and letting the taste of each other’s tongues decide their fate.

In the northern states, it gets colder. They get into Montana and find a solid amount of snow on the ground, more than either of them are used to. Stopping off the side of the highway becomes almost impossible and sleeping in the car is no longer a viable option. They stock up on blankets so they don’t waste gas and take motels when they can find them.

Todd feels like they’re driving in circles, but he can’t help himself from begging to go on, to keep searching. Going back to Seattle seems like a terrible idea, and he doesn’t want to stop in a place for so long he begins to forget why he even started looking in the first place.

The attacks get worse. Some days he forgoes having one completely, only to be followed by a day with three, maybe four in one. It’s all he can do to keep breathing despite the pain that always slams into him, and sometimes he can’t reach his meds in time. Sometimes, when the car is on fire and he can feel the smoke in his lungs as well as the flames against his skin, he watches the pill container vanish in a puff of smoke.

It’s there when he wakes up again, but the fear of losing them for good still lingers. 

 

Four years ago, after the high of a jam session, Todd and Amanda had an impromptu dance party. She found a cassette tape in her garage of the punk bands they used to love and loaded it in, turned up to full volume, and for the entirety of the tape they were in a different world. 

This world had no pararibulitis, no estrangement, no tension. This world was just them.

Todd has a video on his phone of Amanda, dancing with her arms in the air and the largest smile he had seen on her face in years- also the largest smile he’d see again. She twists and turns without a care in the world and then makes eye contact with Todd, right above the camera.

“Come,” she says, breathless from singing too loud and laughing too hard. “Don’t just watch, dance.”

The video shakes and ends after that, but Todd knows that her outstretched hand was taken by his own, and together they danced until there was no more music and no more energy to make their own.

 

Being on the run doesn’t help. Farah meets with her brother and he gives her a phone _for when she accepts that it’s time to give up._

She calls it halfway through the fifth month. Todd is alone in the car now.

This is the time at which Todd wishes he had the strength to keep going.

 

On a whim, he returns to Seattle. His new landlord has already pawned off his furniture and his apartment space but Todd finds his emergency cash stash behind the vent in his old bathroom. Technically, Seattle is a no-go zone, a place that should mean immediate apprehension, but through some sort of miracle Todd manages to not turn up on any recognition scans or stakeouts until long after he’s ditched town. It’s even more of a miracle that he was able to break into his old apartment, especially without Farah’s keen eye. 

Perhaps it’s fate. He isn’t meant to be arrested, because he’s meant to find someone. He’s meant to find Dirk and Amanda and anyone else the universe decides needs finding. 

Which is funny, because of them all, Todd is the one who feels lost. 

 

Todd gets drunk and it eliminates the pain, so he does it again the next day. It doesn’t truly disappear; he can still see the bottles in his hands smash and the glass cutting his palms into ribbons, and every so often he thinks Amanda is there, telling him that this is all his fault.

Amanda still calls him, once in a while, from telephone booths all over the country. She’s on the run, searching like he is. They trade stiff greetings and try to hide their relief in hearing the others’ voices.

“You’re being safe?” he asks habitually at the end of each conversation.

“Always am, bro,” she replies. He knows it means she’s alright as she can be.

Then, he goes and gets a drink. It’s not a time to go get hammered drink. It’s a toast to the kind of friendship they used to have.

 

There’s not much to think about on the empty road. He drives until he physically cannot, until his foot freezes on the pedals and he has nearly slept himself straight off the road. At those times he pulls over or finds a parking lot and crawls to the backseat to sleep. 

Wake up, drive, hallucinate, drive, fall asleep. Wake up, hallucinate, drive, hallucinate, fall asleep. 

It’s an endless cycle of pain. Todd isn’t sure why he’s still looking.

Still, every time he thinks it’s time to give up, to settle and stop looking for something that he’ll never find, there’s something that tugs him back on the road. In Santa Maria it was the cat. In Tapa it was the same symbol they found on top of Dirk’s shoebox, on a flag inside a permanently closed storefront. It was like the universe was taunting him.

Once, he swore he heard Dirk’s voice in his dream, telling him that there was still hope.

 

Todd thinks he’s covered more of the United States than seasoned travelers. He’s been back and forth, crossed the map in a web of routes that connect so frequently his many paths would be indistinguishable. _Everything is connected._ Sometimes Todd just wants to forget about everything and just be for a while.

This, of course, is when something takes him by the hand and forcefully pulls him along ( _into the stream of creation_ ) and he is once again somewhere he shouldn’t be.

Sometimes he stays in one place for less than a day and sometimes he stays for months at a time. There’s no real rhyme or reason as to when he’ll get the urge to pack up and go, only the conviction that he must be where he’s supposed to be.

 

_If I’m where I’m supposed to be, where are they?_

_I’m supposed to be alone._

 

He doesn’t get calls from Amanda anymore. He doesn’t want to think about what that means.

 

Some days, Todd can’t move at all. The pain is just too much, when combining multiple attacks in the day with nightmares and heartache and homesickness and _everything_ that he’s been pushing down since they started out on the road. Losing Farah was a big part of it. She’s no longer there in the passenger seat to ground him every time life starts to fall apart at the seams. 

Sometimes it looks like the sky is ripping clean of the horizon. The night is like the blanket covering a dome of anthills and he is an ant, and every so often there is no sky at all. There is just the accusatory eye of whatever force is moving him around the country as if it is trying to say to him, _try harder._

So Todd apologizes to the sky.

_He’s trying._

 

Farah’s brother calls him sometimes. He gives him updates on her (generally positive, although Todd suspects that there’s more that he’s not getting told) and continues his sales pitch about coming in for a reduced sentence.

“I have to find them,” Todd tells him.

“You do that,” Farah’s brother says. It’s been over two years. He believes it no less than Todd does himself.

It’s at times like this he wonders if it would be better to go to the FBI, to say _hey, I’ve been on the run for years but you can have me now- while I’m here do you think you could direct me to the CIA?_

Not that it works like that, but when nothing is working out and Todd feels empty beyond all measure, this last-ditch option feels like the only one he has. 

 

Todd wakes up one day and realizes he can no longer imagine Dirk’s voice.

He holds onto the video of Amanda because it’s all he has left of her and dreams of Dirk’s face, his mouth opening to give Todd instructions that never reach his ears. 

Admitting that he’s forgotten the sound of Dirk feels like coughing up a bucketful of razor blades. Conveniently, the attack immediately following the revelation is exactly that. 

His dreams slowly begin to lose colour.

 

The thing about being alone is that there is nothing to distract you from thinking. All the radio stations sound the same, just more and more of the boring old talk that seems to cover every inch of the dial, with the addition of a few popular pop songs. Even in different states, the announcers sound the same. After a while, they become a single announcer. The one who talks about mundane news and things that aren’t important.

For one, he thinks it would be nice to have them talk about something _useful_ \- federal corruption, perhaps, or even just a cryptic message that shows him that his heart is still in the right place. Instead, he gets a conversation about the ethics of French fries in milkshakes and nothing remotely helpful.

Farah is arrested by the FBI. She goes to prison. None of this reaches him, because if he knew then that would mean they’ve found him, too, and that hasn’t happened yet. He is wasting what gas money he has (not much) and adding to the list of illegal things he’s done to save himself.

 

He was wrong. He couldn’t grow from the person he was. He’ll stay stuck in this body until someone gets him out. He knows who this someone is. He just needs to get to him.  
After all, that is his whole reason for being here. Every so often, he’ll steal a car and leave the old one in its place ( _sort of a compensation, he guesses_ ) so that his trail is harder to follow. Not that stolen cars are hard to track. Honestly, it’s probably more conspicuous than him just keeping one not-stolen car, but he can’t find it in him to care. 

 

She is released from prison. 

He is still driving. Still looking. Still waiting for the feeling to come back. 

 

He grows a beard. Every time he gets out of the car, his muscles scream at him. Years and years of being on the road would do that to a man, and it’s not like he was particularly young in the first place. 

When it’s late at night and there are no cars to be seen and Todd can’t see more than what his headlights catch, he thinks. It’s when the radio can’t drown out his mind’s voice so his mind begins to drown out any sort of outer stimulus other than the constant belt of asphalt between his wheels. He thinks about just how _goddamn perfect_ it is that just when he had something good in his life, the universe yanked the rug out from under his feet.

He’s prayed to every single deity he knows of and then some, has taken superstition to a whole new level, and when he searches for clues he can feel his heart beat against his lungs as he breathes. But this is only when he does: most days pass in a haze of hallucination and tired acceptance, without any sort of watchful eye. It’s been too long. 

This is the time at which Todd wishes he had the strength to stop. 

 

He is lying in the back of his car. The air is thick and humid and nothing has been able to alleviate the pressure in his forehead since it blossomed the night before. His jacket is draped over his torso, a blanket folded behind his head as a pillow, and between flashes of colours and vague shapes Todd tries fitfully to sleep.

It’s 2am. The sky is clear outside the window.

Todd thinks he may be hallucinating. It’s a toss-up, really, since he’s been out of pills for months now and all sorts of realities tend to blur together now. But there’s a face outside his window, still in the shadow, and it’s not trying to break in or staring at him like he’s some sort of freak.

Instead, there’s a familiarity to the way the figure moves with a broken sort of grace, swooping back and forth between the windows. Todd reaches out with a heavy arm and rolls down the window nearest his head.

“Todd?” says the voice he’s forgotten.

Todd looks through the window, _really_ looks, and all he sees is stars.

**Author's Note:**

> I thought of this after I finished the season back in November-- but here we are, three months later. Whoops?
> 
> Tell me what you think! I love hearing from you all!
> 
> Also, look at my tumblr (impalahallows) and my writing tag (grace writes) for some cool theatre stuff and some poetry. My inbox is open too, if you want to send requests or prompts!


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